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why cant some people realise that to lose weight i i have to be in a calorie deficit??
Replies
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lorimiller18 wrote: »If eating less and moving more was that simple and worked, no one training for a marathon would be overweight, and ive seen plenty of overweight runners. I was one, living on calorie deficit, running, working out, doing ultrathons. Its not sustainable. You'll lose weight in the beginning, but you'll gain it back unless you luve your life in a calorie deficit. Many people actually under eat. CICO works, but yiu need to have a healthy metabolism and no underlying health issues for it to work properly. I've undereaten for the last couple years and have consistently gained weight. Now I'm with a trainer that has me on a reverse diet, adding in 500 calories a day.
Actually, lots of people find that training for a marathon dramatically increases their appetite. It's not at all surprising that there are overweight runners as it is VERY EASY to gain weight while running for many people unless deliberate steps are taken to control food intake.
I have been running marathons since 2016, sometimes multiple marathons a year. I would absolutely gain weight if I wasn't also counting calories, as even my longest training runs don't burn as many calories as I could eat if left to my own, uncontrolled, devices.
You don't have to "live your life in a calorie deficit" to maintain your weight. All you have to do is consume the number of calories your body needs given your activity. It's a very simple concept that is often very hard to consistently implement in practice as our bodies will sometimes signal hunger to us when we don't actually "need" food and our minds will sometimes encourage us to keep eating (especially the hyper-palatable food many of us are surrounded with) even when we aren't especially hungry.
I find my current way of life (running a lot, counting calories, maintaining my weight) to be very sustainable. Been doing it since 2015. Would it be an ideal fit for everyone? No. But it works for me. It's a path, among several, to the ONLY route to consistently maintaining a healthy body weight, which is to consume the number of calories that your body requires.10 -
lorimiller18 wrote: »If eating less and moving more was that simple and worked, no one training for a marathon would be overweight, and ive seen plenty of overweight runners. I was one, living on calorie deficit, running, working out, doing ultrathons. Its not sustainable. You'll lose weight in the beginning, but you'll gain it back unless you luve your life in a calorie deficit. Many people actually under eat. CICO works, but yiu need to have a healthy metabolism and no underlying health issues for it to work properly. I've undereaten for the last couple years and have consistently gained weight. Now I'm with a trainer that has me on a reverse diet, adding in 500 calories a day.
i think you under-estimate just how quickly runger can make you wolf down a few thousand calories of extremely-calorie-dense pub food..and many, many group runs end at pubs. (You also don't know how long they've been running for - it takes years for weight to come off at a reasonable rate).3 -
lorimiller18 wrote: »If eating less and moving more was that simple and worked, no one training for a marathon would be overweight, and ive seen plenty of overweight runners. I was one, living on calorie deficit, running, working out, doing ultrathons. Its not sustainable. You'll lose weight in the beginning, but you'll gain it back unless you luve your life in a calorie deficit. Many people actually under eat. CICO works, but yiu need to have a healthy metabolism and no underlying health issues for it to work properly. I've undereaten for the last couple years and have consistently gained weight. Now I'm with a trainer that has me on a reverse diet, adding in 500 calories a day.
i think you under-estimate just how quickly runger can make you wolf down a few thousand calories of extremely-calorie-dense pub food..and many, many group runs end at pubs. (You also don't know how long they've been running for - it takes years for weight to come off at a reasonable rate).
(a burger, fries, and a beer can easily get to 2000 calories (ETA: less for a simpler, smaller burger, but most pubs have pride in their work; also less if you don't get the really good beer)...I am definitely hungry enough to wolf that down in a blink of the eye after a long run.... alas, it would take 27 miles to burn it off).7 -
lorimiller18 wrote: »If eating less and moving more was that simple and worked, no one training for a marathon would be overweight, and ive seen plenty of overweight runners. I was one, living on calorie deficit, running, working out, doing ultrathons. Its not sustainable. You'll lose weight in the beginning, but you'll gain it back unless you luve your life in a calorie deficit. Many people actually under eat. CICO works, but yiu need to have a healthy metabolism and no underlying health issues for it to work properly. I've undereaten for the last couple years and have consistently gained weight. Now I'm with a trainer that has me on a reverse diet, adding in 500 calories a day.
i think you under-estimate just how quickly runger can make you wolf down a few thousand calories of extremely-calorie-dense pub food..and many, many group runs end at pubs. (You also don't know how long they've been running for - it takes years for weight to come off at a reasonable rate).
(a burger, fries, and a beer is easily 2000 calories...I am definitely hungry enough to wolf that down in a blink of the eye after a long run.... alas, it would take 27 miles to burn it off).
Anyone who has ever seen me attack a pizza and beer after a long run would understand how overweight runners can exist.
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When I lost most of my weight from tracking years ago (I lost like 30 through exercise over two years but didn't track and then lost 50 more after tracking), a lot of my family was like, "how did you do that???". When I said just by tracking and moving more, it was like "nah, won't work for me. No way!".
Alrighty then. Whatever you want to believe.
Regarding running (or any serious endurance cardio), I started running years ago and ran for like 6 years and moved to rowing when my knee couldn't take it any more. I'm always stunned, to this day, at just how much I can gain while burning 600 to 900 calories a day. That's two large PB&J toasts and I'm net even on the day. And I can eat some PB&J with the best of them!3 -
CICO doesn't work. It all depends on where you live.
Fact 1. When I moved from my first house to my second house I gained a lot of weight and was unable to make lasting progress the entire time I lived there.
Fact 2. Shortly after I moved to my third house from my second house I began losing weight and I am now at the lowest weight I have been since I was a teenager.
The above did happen and, in fact, moving did help me lose weight. A change of environment away from the place I had a lot of bad habits at the time I was ready to form some new better habits was an aid. I do not think it would be a stretch to find studies that show that a change of location at a critical time can be beneficial. I didn't move to lose. It was just good timing.
What I have done with the above is taken 2 facts and attributed more to them than I should. Having an aid is great. Having a hindrance sucks. Like most people I had some aids and some hindrances. None of that changes the physical process of losing weight which is forcing your body to use stored energy. This has been summed up in the energy equation known as CICO.
CICO is not calorie counting. It is not even weight loss. It is an energy equation. It is how you gain or lose stored energy. If most of your minimal gain days balance out with your minimal loss days you are in maintenance.
If your body can run on something other than food energy and stored energy then what is keeping it from taking every calorie of food energy and converting it to fat?10 -
trulyhealy wrote: »cmriverside wrote: »Things I don't discuss with acquaintances:
Politics
Religion
Covid19
Abortion
Gun Control
Weight loss and everything that goes along with it
she’s not an acquaintance we talk about weight loss a lot and i thought she would understand the facts since she’s lost weight
Most people who do named diets don't really know or understand what a calorie deficit really is...and even if they do have some kind of understanding, they confuse CICO with calorie counting rather than an actual process the body goes through regardless of whether they are aware of that process or not.3 -
I bring this out from time to time as we humans are generally bad at measuring and/or estimating what we've actually consumed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA9AdlhB18o&t=7s 6 -
When it comes to people in my life I do not offer advice unless I am asked. Sometimes this bugs me because I can see the mistake but I say nothing because it is not my place. So after months of watching someone exercise A LOT and continue to gain weight I was finally asked what might help.
"STOP EXERCISING SO MUCH! IT IS JUST MAKING YOU HUNGRIER!"
I didn't actually yell it but this person does have pressing medical concerns. I went on to explain that if you do not have your hunger controlled by food first then burning 700+ calories a day has a good chance of backfiring. It seems like so many calories but that is only if you are making mindful choices. If you are not you can blow past that easily at any restaurant or in any well stocked snack cupboard in just a few minutes.
I told the person to scale it back for a few weeks, work on food control, then ramp it back up.
My advice has gone unheeded because food control is a low interest but I remain hopeful.6 -
Fact 1. When I moved from my first house to my second house I gained a lot of weight and was unable to make lasting progress the entire time I lived there.
Fact 2. Shortly after I moved to my third house from my second house I began losing weight and I am now at the lowest weight I have been since I was a teenager.
this anecdote and the 'but there are overweight runners' argument reminds me of the oft claimed point about diet coke " It makes you gain weight, lots of overweight people drink it"
All of the above have in common - taking one factor out of context and not seeing the whole equation.
In all these cases ,as with every other case, the outcome doesn't depend on one thing - if the total equation over time is calorie deficit, you will lose weight6 -
paperpudding wrote: »I suppose those of you who disagree know much better than my medical advisers.........................................
well we dont actually know what your medical advisors said -we only have a second hand version of that via you.
My long experience of working in medical care has shown me that many patients misunderstand what they are told
Just today somebody said their doctor had told them to stop taking all their medication - there was no record in the patients notes of this and the doctor confirmed he had said no such thing.
This is very true. There are many times I clearly advise a patient of something and even put it in writing, for example, “follow up with your primary doctor within a week”, only to have them claim later that I never told them that or said something entirely different.2 -
I don't argue with people. I don't argue because I have gotten so much science that's 50+ years old thrown at me as if it were STILL relevant. 21st century science is strongly supporting a hormonal theory to weight loss, not a calorie deficit theory. Intermittent fasting plays strongly into the hormonal theory because the goal of it is to allow your insulin to go down and glucagon to increase. We need glucagon to start the fat loss process (lipolysis)...if you're spiking your insulin 3-6x/day and have a 14-16 hour eating window, then you don't lose weight. The goal of intermittent fasting is not to reduce calories, per say, that's just a secondary effect. There's also the "starvation diet" thing to contend with as well. For most of the 20th century, 'starvation diet' was 1200-1500 calories per/day. Let that sink in a minute. Isn't that the GOAL for most of us??? Why?
A calorie is a calorie is a calorie----because physics, that's why. A calorie is the unit of heat needed to heat 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius. Period. It's not anything else. Our bodies NEED to maintain a certain temperature...in fact, it's tightly regulated. The life giving chemical processes keeping us alive and healthy depend on it. These processes also depend on the pH of the blood to be between 7.35-7.45 and, thus, it is also tightly regulated. The human body's chemical processes that regulate these can use 2 energy sources: glucose and ketone bodies (hereafter: ketones). These energy sources are used in the Krebs's cycle which produces ATP.....which the cells use to do work (not glucose, not ketones). The aforementioned hormones, insulin and glucagon, are antagonistic hormones---meaning they have the opposite effects. The problem with glucose is that too much of it destroys tissue (blood), thus insulin. Insulin gets it out of our blood, usually by storing it as fat or putting it in cells for use in the Krebs cycle. When cells don't take in glucose, tissue damage happens or we get fatter. The A1C blood test detects the level of blood that's been 'glycated'....saturated with glucose. If this number is above 6.5, it indicates Diabetes type 2. 5.6-6.4 indicates tissue damage is occurring but not technically diabetic, yet...it's called insulin resistance/pre-diabetes. While insulin is in the blood, glucagon is not. Meaning, no fat loss is possible----calorie deficit or not. Now let's talk about glucagon.....
Glucagon is absolutely needed for your body to access the fat stores in your body. Increasing this hormone by fasting (regularly or not) is how fat loss happens. If you don't eat, your body still needs to maintain it's temperature and ATP still is needed by cells of all types. Enter Ketones......they come in at a different point in the Krebs cycle to produce ATP. In fact, they produce more ATP than glucose. So the issue with ketone bodies is 2-fold: raising body temperature excessively and acidifying the blood. In normal people, once the blood pH hits 7.35, insulin is called into action to stop the production of glucagon. The blood pH normalizes and the process occurs again, assuming you don't eat. This also stops fat loss by making the liver produce glucose from it's stores of glycogen or from a process called gluconeogenesis---the making of glucose. It's a medical and physiological fact that the human body does not need to consume any carbohydrate to produce glucose....the liver is fully capable of producing 100% of the glucose needed by the body....even your brain's needs can be met without consuming carbs. Ketones can supply up to 85% of your brain's energy needs....your liver's glucose, the other 15%.
Sorry for my long response...but I need you to understand that the lady in the gym was probably worried about her hormones to lose fat and get fit.....which is 21st century science with a few Nobel prizes backing it up.1 -
MsBehaving_since_the_70s wrote: »I don't argue with people. I don't argue because I have gotten so much science that's 50+ years old thrown at me as if it were STILL relevant. 21st century science is strongly supporting a hormonal theory to weight loss, not a calorie deficit theory. Intermittent fasting plays strongly into the hormonal theory because the goal of it is to allow your insulin to go down and glucagon to increase. We need glucagon to start the fat loss process (lipolysis)...if you're spiking your insulin 3-6x/day and have a 14-16 hour eating window, then you don't lose weight. The goal of intermittent fasting is not to reduce calories, per say, that's just a secondary effect. There's also the "starvation diet" thing to contend with as well. For most of the 20th century, 'starvation diet' was 1200-1500 calories per/day. Let that sink in a minute. Isn't that the GOAL for most of us??? Why?
A calorie is a calorie is a calorie----because physics, that's why. A calorie is the unit of heat needed to heat 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius. Period. It's not anything else. Our bodies NEED to maintain a certain temperature...in fact, it's tightly regulated. The life giving chemical processes keeping us alive and healthy depend on it. These processes also depend on the pH of the blood to be between 7.35-7.45 and, thus, it is also tightly regulated. The human body's chemical processes that regulate these can use 2 energy sources: glucose and ketone bodies (hereafter: ketones). These energy sources are used in the Krebs's cycle which produces ATP.....which the cells use to do work (not glucose, not ketones). The aforementioned hormones, insulin and glucagon, are antagonistic hormones---meaning they have the opposite effects. The problem with glucose is that too much of it destroys tissue (blood), thus insulin. Insulin gets it out of our blood, usually by storing it as fat or putting it in cells for use in the Krebs cycle. When cells don't take in glucose, tissue damage happens or we get fatter. The A1C blood test detects the level of blood that's been 'glycated'....saturated with glucose. If this number is above 6.5, it indicates Diabetes type 2. 5.6-6.4 indicates tissue damage is occurring but not technically diabetic, yet...it's called insulin resistance/pre-diabetes. While insulin is in the blood, glucagon is not. Meaning, no fat loss is possible----calorie deficit or not. Now let's talk about glucagon.....
Glucagon is absolutely needed for your body to access the fat stores in your body. Increasing this hormone by fasting (regularly or not) is how fat loss happens. If you don't eat, your body still needs to maintain it's temperature and ATP still is needed by cells of all types. Enter Ketones......they come in at a different point in the Krebs cycle to produce ATP. In fact, they produce more ATP than glucose. So the issue with ketone bodies is 2-fold: raising body temperature excessively and acidifying the blood. In normal people, once the blood pH hits 7.35, insulin is called into action to stop the production of glucagon. The blood pH normalizes and the process occurs again, assuming you don't eat. This also stops fat loss by making the liver produce glucose from it's stores of glycogen or from a process called gluconeogenesis---the making of glucose. It's a medical and physiological fact that the human body does not need to consume any carbohydrate to produce glucose....the liver is fully capable of producing 100% of the glucose needed by the body....even your brain's needs can be met without consuming carbs. Ketones can supply up to 85% of your brain's energy needs....your liver's glucose, the other 15%.
Sorry for my long response...but I need you to understand that the lady in the gym was probably worried about her hormones to lose fat and get fit.....which is 21st century science with a few Nobel prizes backing it up.
So, how ya figure people lose substantial weight and keep it off, without IF?
Because we do.13 -
Add me to that.
Have done no IF ever and am more of a graze on bits throughout the day person - and yet miraculously I have defied this 21st century science and lost weight and the maintained it for another 6 years. !!!!!
Sorry for my short response - but your new 'science' is nonsense.
CICO is as relevant today as it was 50 or 500 years ago.
Human body hasn't changed and basic physics hasn't changed.8 -
"if you're spiking your insulin 3-6x/day and have a 14-16 hour eating window, then you don't lose weight."
That's funny as I tend to do IF in the winter when my calorie allowance is smaller and gain some weight and then in spring I eat far more frequently and lose that weight again despite "spiking" my insulin with high carb drinks and foods very frequently because I have a very high calorie allowance.
Must be because I was born in the 20th century that "21st century science" doesn't work.
Hmmmm.9 -
My body overproduces insulin when I eat so I "spike" more than your average person. I lost weight when I took in less energy than I needed to live and move forcing my body to use reserves.
The human body operates the same way in the 21st century as it did in the 1st century. The key difference is that in the last 2 centuries weight loss "science" and amazing "breakthroughs" have gotten to be far more lucrative.
Insulin is the new grapefruit diet and so far IF is really only amazing for people with IR and rodents. Outside of being a useful tool for some to more easily stay in a calorie deficit, of course.7 -
MsBehaving_since_the_70s wrote: »....which is 21st century science with a few Nobel prizes backing it up.
Who has gotten these Nobel prizes that you think are backing up your incorrect 'science'?4
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